Esther Kinsky: “Summer Freshness”

Not just an idyllic place. But the Locals wrecked holiday colony is sufficient, to spend the summer time. Esther Kinsky, takes us on a journey into the Hungarian Wasteland.

In the sparsely populated South of Hungary, where Esther Kinsky has a skinny novel, “summer freshness”, the summer homes in the “Üdülo” (Hungarian: holiday settlement) from year to year on their short-term recovery.

The dilapidated post-Communist holiday colony is no longer attracting all of the endure it holiday weather at home. The river offers a welcome cooling. Only extremely rare for tourists to stray from outside of there.

From summery light-heartedness is, however, told only in the case of beer. Work here the least, in the factory there is nothing more to earn. What remains is seasonal work. Not everyone can afford to take a vacation in the “Üdülo”.

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“Summer fresh” by Esther Kinsky

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“Summer fresh” by Esther Kinsky

High-Pitched Summer Pleasure

Refreshing change of pace to distract the Locals in the village of the summer boredom, the bright blue “Swimmingpull”. Innkeeper Lacibáci to come as a scrap dealer money, has ordered it. A Sensation in the town, all talk about it.

Proud and snooty, he has placed him in the middle of the cluttered yard, between car wrecks and rusted replacement parts, to the pleasure of his wife and many grandchildren and nephews.

“The trucks honked the driver on the major road, when they came to Lacibácis garden over, and the swimmers in waist-high water and waved back. The turkeys kollerten with billowing Zuckhälsen, pulled in the yard from one corner to the other, picked between scrap and colorful water toys, while the Ruth woman looked at in the squat smoked and pensive Rusty …”

Life on river landscapes: Esther Kinsky, locates her novel in Hungary

Sanded Landscapes Of The Soul

Esther Kinksy told in her novel “people in a transitional society”: After the fall of the “Iron curtain” in 1990, and the political upheaval in Eastern Europe, Hungary will experience a Phase of complete destabilization: Nothing is more like before, hardly anything. The future is only dimly on the horizon.

The Ritual to go every summer in the old familiar, shabby holiday colony is a in the new time over the salvaged piece of life – even if the summer is fresh just relaxing.

“The cups and bottles, plates, spoons. Everything in its place. Summer. On weekdays it remained silent in the üdülo, but in the pub it smelled after the aftermath of the weekend: the spilled beer, the sweat, the cheap summer perfumes the girl, the exhaust clouds of the motorcycle driver and the helpless chlorine bleach with urine.”

Stranded existences, Hopeless, unemployed, has thrown the unaccustomed Turbo-capitalism, in their narratives to flirt joyful “Kozakjungs from the city,” and girl in a mini skirt and glitter shoes, the hot either Zsusa or Marika. You all dream of love, and of a newly found freedom.

Poetic Kinsky describes compacted in powerful images, which can cause breaks in a resume in the landscape of the Soul of people. Nature also carries with her the traces of this lost. “The sky was white with soft grey cushions. Clouds, not knowing what to do with, because the shaggy-WAN heat-chapped Land among them they are not wanted.”

A writer only in the second step

Before Esther Kinsky (Jg. 1956), her first book, dared, she worked as a Translator from the Polish, Russian and English. Her specialty was poetry (including Hanna Krall).

Word carefully, almost barren, with an enormous linguistic power she captures in her novel the melancholy Desolation, this frontier country between Hungary, Romania and Serbia. Relentlessly, she describes the structure of the precarious social, in the hopelessness of the day.

Here in the sparsely populated Banat Kinsky, who grew up in Germany, in the Rhineland has lived many years and worked. In 2004, she was drawn to years ago, in the busy hustle and bustle of London to Eastern Europe: first to Budapest and then in the South of Hungary, to be without the language. On a trip you had bought spontaneously a vacant house. And was stayed. The simplicity of life gave her the calmness to Write.

An archaeologist of the Everyday

Today lives and works of Esther Kinsky as a writer in Berlin. Successfully: Only for a couple of weeks in the year, she comes back in the Hungarian border region. The margin between Idyll and fragile States of nightmare, too, had not you can bridge as “Foreign”: they had to move away, the dream of a simple life on the Land buried.

You are the strong summer-images of a capitalist prosperity suspended land.

“On the street corners, the melon seller built up their stands. The green water-melons shone, patient animals, herds that had it here. In addition, the yellow melons, gray-rauschalig and fragrant, ungelb, the only scent that could compete with the metal lunch glow.”

Esther Kinsky: “Summer Fresh” (2009), Verlag Matthes & Seitz, Berlin

Between 1987 and 2018, published by Esther Kinsky children’s books, novels, and poems. In 2016, they took over the Thomas-Kling-lecturer in Poetics at the University of Bonn. For “Grove. A site novel,” you 2018, the prize of the Leipzig book fair.